


Reflection/Depersonalization

by daroos



Category: Captain America, Captain America (Movies), The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Depersonalization, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multi, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Red Room (Marvel), everyone is old, illya wants to help, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 03:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18044363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daroos/pseuds/daroos
Summary: Hydra has revealed itself, SHIELD is gone, and the Winter Soldier is in the wind. The Soldier finds himself captured by an old comrade, insistent upon his rehabilitation.





	Reflection/Depersonalization

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my beta readers weeghostie and redstaronmyshoulder who pointed out all the times I couldn't use semicolons, and when I'd used the wrong words. Thank you, thank you.

It seemed like symmetry somehow though he couldn’t recall why. 

The Soldier struggled in his restraints and gave into the impulse to growl. “Easy, Soldier.”

He looked up at the other Russian and flashes of him against color blocks of mustard and avocado, gilded resin beads and napped velour dazzled the Soldier’s vision. “Illya.”

“Very good.”

“Why are you here?”

“That’s what you want to ask?” Illya replied.

The Soldier chewed on his thoughts, his teeth clacking together with the motion. “How are you here?”

Illya smiled - his cheeks rounded like apples, showing no pleasure at all. “You always were smarter than the handlers thought.”

The Soldier glared, his eyes like embers in beds of soot.

Illya squatted and folded his bulk down so he loomed a little less. The movement was smooth with no aging joint pops.

“I knew you but… long ago. Wasn’t it long ago?” he asked, nearly plaintive.

Illya nodded. “A lifetime ago and more.”

“I _trained_ you.”

“They would say I trained on you, but yes. They made me from you. They made me from what you taught them and then you taught me.”

“I…” he thought. “Symmetry.”

“Truly,” Illya conceded. He looked down at his trussed mentor - the Winter Soldier - and smiled. “Now,” he said, the words weighty on his tongue, “I will teach you.”

Illya took a hold of his bound ankles, and dragged the Winter Soldier out of the first floor motel room. The car he had stolen earlier was gone, and a car that would have been collectible if its exterior had been cared for sat in its place, the trunk open in invitation. Illya shoved him in with the utilitarian movements of the much-practiced, and slammed the lid shut.

Illya entered the car and it started with a rumble and a purr belying its ratty exterior. The trunk smelled of metal and rubber and engine oil, but there were no tools in evidence - no means to escape. His left arm was a dead weight pulling at his right shoulder in the cuffs and frustration and fear and resignation spun through his thoughts.

Illya and someone else - a woman - conversed but the Soldier couldn’t hear them properly. He settled in for a long drive, rolling just so to keep from rattling around in the dark, and tucking his head in to protect it somewhat from knocks.

They got to highway speeds quickly, and somehow, for some reason, the Soldier slept.

\--

The Soldier dreamed of cigarette smoke and flashes of gold gilt. He dreamed of the concrete-lined arena where he often fought with other Russians - soldiers and girls and sometimes a tall, broad blond who had too many faces. The drip drip of water in the arena blended with the tick tick of a cooling engine as he woke.

Voices argued outside the car; Illya, a woman, and a man. He tested his metal arm but it was still unresponsive. Whatever they’d done to disable it wasn’t wearing off.

“-realize that you think that but you can’t possibly-” the unknown male voice said.

“I _know_ it,” Illya’s voice growled. The thump of a fist on a chest. “In here. I _was_ that.”

“Sweet, no.” The woman.

“Darling,” the man, “my memory may be going in my golden years but I think I would have noticed you behaving like that.”

“I know you think your words are a kindness-”

“The _kindness_ would be to put it down.” The woman’s voice was hard and final and the tone tickled at something deep in the Soldier. Something from before concrete cells and blue ice crystals crowding his memory.

There was silence outside of the trunk and the Soldier’s programming said now would be a time to attack, if he had been able. Emotions clouded reason and slowed reactions and emotions were exactly what was happening outside his little trunk world.

“Fine.” The woman snapped and he heard steps retreat - the triplets of someone walking with a cane.

“I will do this with your help or without,” Illya growled.

There was another long pause before the trunk opened, briefly blinding the Soldier. The car was in a garage - large, and set up for automotive repair - and a hanging work light shone in at him.

A long whistle sounded impressed in tone.

“Well fuck,” the man - the Whistler, said.

The Soldier blinked and squinted through the light. Illya towered in the foreground while an older man in a three piece suit stood slightly behind him, hands in his pockets. The Whistler. The Soldier’s breathing quickened, nostrils blown wide like a racehorse.

Combatants, the Soldier knew. Weapons and warriors dressed as men and women to be cut through like grass, the Soldier knew. Men in suits were so very much worse than that. They were the puppet masters who pulled his strings and flipped the switches that brought pain and destroyed the Soldier deep in a place a person might have called his soul. This one had the confident air and debonair sort of charm that presaged the worst sort of puppet man.

“Do you know him?” Illya asked, and gestured with his head towards the Whistler. The Soldier shook his head, roughly.

The Whistler shrugged. “Nor I, him. Aside from his reputation. You may have been the Red Menace, but good god, the kill count on that pate is something for the record books.”

The Soldier remained still, bound and stuffed in the trunk like luggage. “He is the tool they made him. As was I. As were we all.”

The Whistler snorted. “If the US Government made me anything it was paranoid and tired - nothing more.” He smirked to himself. “Have fun with your plaything, then. If he murders us all, well… some of us were old anyway.”

\--

“Please don’t test your restraint too much. That bolt goes straight to the building’s steel frame. If you manage to pull it out of shape the whole building is liable to come down on us.”

The Soldier remained still, his single functioning arm pulling him up. His non-functioning arm pulled him down. With rest and calm and the absence of voices to distract him or order him or threaten him, curiosity came back to the Soldier.

“How are you here?” His voice was rough and it sounded like it belonged to a stranger. The Soldier’s voice always sounded like it belonged to a stranger when it spoke in English.

“The same way you are, I imagine,” Illya replied. He rolled up his sleeves with precise movements.

“Cryo?” The Soldier didn’t have the knowledge of why or how cryo worked, but he knew it meant the cold and the lost time and the waking up helpless and empty.

Illya frowned at him, confused or incredulous. “Perhaps not the same way you are, though I imagine the side effects of the Red Room’s treatments will become clear to you once you stay awake for a few decades at a time.”

Decades. Decades had no meaning to the Soldier. Time passed in the length of missions, and it happened in the Now and the Soon. Decades were things that _people_ experienced; weapons operated on entirely different scales.

“I don’t…”

\--

Illya left him alone for a while and returned with the woman with the cane. He didn’t warn the Soldier not to hurt the woman; there would have been no reason to hurt her, nothing gained or lost and no advantage to garner. The woman looked frail, but her eyes were like cut gems and the Soldier sensed a mind far more dangerous than her stature belied.

“Pull it out for me, darling. You know how my back gets.” Illya approached the Soldier and arranged his metal arm so it was less folded under him and more splayed to the side. The Soldier growled. “Yes, you are quite convincing me you’re not a mad dog with that act,” the woman said to the Soldier. To Illya, “I admit the technology is interesting enough but keeping it around is just going to make it harder when we have to take it out back and end it.”

The Soldier wondered if being ended would be more pleasant than the burden of continuing on. He decided it probably was: pain without end did not seem preferable to pain _with_ an end, and he already had experience with the former.

“We will not shoot him like a rabid dog,” Illya responded, sounding as though this was rehashing a prior conversation. Illya proffered a little stool for the woman, who sat and unrolled a set of tools on her lap.

“What are you–” the Soldier coughed. 

“Shut up,” the woman told him, and he shut up. Orders he knew, and though recently it had seemed like a good idea to strain against them, the effort seemed too much right now. This woman seemed to know what she was doing with him - a technician of some sort - and he lacked the impetus to fight her ministrations.

She pulled up parts of the arm and worked quietly with hmms and tsks of irritation her only ejaculations. The Soldier relaxed into his restraints as the calm of routine took over his mind. Countless times someone had fiddled over his side like this, and it almost always increased functionality and decreased pain. He nearly dozed.

“You’ve soothed the savage beast,” Illya said, rousing the Soldier from his calm.

A thunk, and the weight on his left side abated. He looked over and the arm was off entirely. The Soldier’s heart rate ticked up at the sight of the bare ball joint and the certain feeling of vulnerability.

“Not hardly,” the woman replied. “Get that for me, will you? I’m fairly certain there’s something in here still broadcasting.” She picked up her tools and moved towards his bared armature.

“No.”

The word startled them both, and the Soldier braced for punishment. Her eyes cut to Illya, dragging the non-responsive arm to a workbench.

“Yes,” she said. “Or are you eager to land back in Hydra’s tentacles?”

“No,” the Soldier said, almost pleading. No, no Hydra. No please don’t take anything more from it- from him. No more.

Her tone sharpened. “Are you going to trouble me?”

Cold washed through the Soldier. “No.” He tensed to keep from shrinking from her and her tools. Reticence to be serviced would be punished.

Serviced. The Soldier did not fear servicing. 

This servicing left him helpless. He feared servicing. The spiral of confusion and anxiety distracted him from the woman and her tools while she pulled more parts of him out, tossing them to Illya as they were removed.

“Cheap Soviet trash,” she muttered, and irritation flashed over Illya’s face.

“Durable and reliable Soviet hardware.”

“Oh you shut up too. After all that’s gone on you’re still defending their technology.” She scoffed. “Of course you’re still defending their technology,” she said under her breath.

“I am, after all, the product of that technology.”

She rolled her eyes, her back to Illya but thus clearly facing the Soldier.

“I swear to you, Illyusha…”

“Please. Tell me what you swear.”

She rolled her eyes again. “I swear to love your stupid face until it gets me killed.” She stood. “He’s clean. Technologically speaking.”

“Thank you my sweet.”

\--

Illya fed him water, removed the ties from his ankles, and took him to the bathroom before securing him once more. The Soldier could stand and stretch a little bit, but he was still bolted to the wall and he’d have to mangle his only hand beyond recognition to get it out of the cuff.

Illya seemed satisfied with his situation as he watched the Soldier test the limits of his confinement and finally settle.

“I’m going to ask you questions, and you must tell me the truth. If you do not know the answer you will say ‘I don’t know’ and if you cannot remember an answer you will say ‘I cannot remember. Do you understand?” Illya’s voice drew him like a bright light for bugs.

“Yes.”

“What year is it?”

“2015.”

“What is your mission?”

“Evade capture.” The Soldier paused and considered. That was an imperative below all missions; there had been something more urgent. “Captain America.”

“What is your mission with Captain America?”

The Soldier paused. He remembered fighting with an American flag man. He remembered a blond with too many faces. He didn’t remember nearly enough. “Captain America,” he repeated. “I don’t remember,” the Soldier finally decided. That had been offered to him as a response.

“Who is your handler?”

“Pierce.”

“Alexander Pierce?”

“Affirmative.” Steve.

“Pierce has been compromised.”

“Confirmation required.”

Illya huffed a sigh. “Where is your base?”

“Base has been compromised.” The Soldier’s metal fist went through machinery in vivid flashes of memory. Some of it sparked and hurt but he destroyed it with impunity. Blood stuck between the plates of his finger joints and flaked off his cheek. “I compromised base,” he added, confused.

\--

They left him there for a while, bolted to the wall of the garage like a piece of equipment in storage. It was not treatment that the Soldier was unfamiliar with, so he settled in for a long wait, conserving energy and resources until they returned for him.

There would be no mission from them - they weren’t his handlers - and escape and evade seemed both unlikely at the moment, and too tiring to plan right then. He would wait, and he would rest, and when he was strong he would… The Soldier dozed against the wall, and dreamed grey dreams.

\--

Illya returned, and that woke the Soldier. He had changed clothes and his hair was slick with moisture.

“We are having dinner soon. You will join us,” Illya said. The Soldier said nothing and remained still. “If you attempt to escape you will be punished. If you attempt to injure anyone you will be punished. Do you understand?”

The Soldier didn’t want to injure anybody. The Soldier desperately wanted to hurt everyone. He nodded just once, a bob of his head.

“Use your words,” Illya commanded.

“I understand.” Nobody had wanted him to use his words. Words almost always ended up being painful in the end, and he was tired of pain. He glanced at the ball joint of his metal shoulder and realized for the first time that there had been pain in it, and that that pain had lessened with its removal.

“You will treat everyone with respect. If you are asked questions you will respond truthfully. If you don’t know or do not remember you will say so.”

“I understand,” the Soldier repeated.

Illya freed his arm and gestured towards the door at the far end of the garage.

“What should we call you, _soldat_?”

“I don’t know.”

“We can hardly use your call sign in our living room.” The Soldier remained silent and kept his pace steady. “Did you have another name, once? What did others call you?”

“The man on the bridge called me Bucky.”

“Bucky?” Illya repeated, incredulous.

They were at the door. It was a metal fire door, heavy and covered with half a century’s worth of coats of paint. He opened it into a little room of lockers. It smelled of metal and expensive hand soap like a combination sauna and shipyard. Through another door was a sitting room, dark and cozy, with a hodgepodge of finely crafted wood furniture and antique seating.

The woman sat in a lounge chair like a set piece, her eyes never leaving him as he entered and stood.

“Sit,” Illya commanded. The Soldier was nearest the end of a velvet-upholstered fainting couch, so he sat at its end, feet braced wide.

“Quite the trick,” the woman said to Illya without moving her eyes from the Soldier. “Can he sit up and beg too?”

“Don’t be cruel,” Illya snapped, and the woman’s nostrils flared in annoyance at the reproof.

“What am I to be, then?” she muttered.

Illya crossed to her, took her hand and kissed an astonishingly large ring on her finger. “Be the woman who taught me to be a man once again.”

The Whistler walked into the room. “The meat is resting: ten minutes.” He wore an impeccably clean apron. The Soldier noticed the smells of food - meat and onions - and his stomach growled.

The Whistler went to a bar cart in the corner of the room and began to fiddle with its contents. “So, _sobaka_ , when was the last time you remember being a person?”

The Soldier considered the question from the Whistler. He remembered being the Soldier. He remembered killing in woods, in cities and towns, in deserts, on roads, near water. He remembered running with a pack of other Soldiers - men in Russian coats and men in Allied gear and a few brief times with young women in thick scarves.

The “cachukata-chuckata-chuck” of a cocktail shaker startled the Soldier out of memory.

“I have always found sitting down with a cocktail like a civilized human to improve my state immensely.” The Whistler poured the shaker into three glasses with the practiced ease of a bartender. He dropped a cherry into each and added a large cube of ice. “Care to try it?”

The Whistler set one of the tumblers in front of the Soldier without an affirmative and took a glass for himself. The woman took the third glass and stirred the cherry around by its stem but didn’t drink. Only when the Whistler took a satisfied swallow did the Soldier pick it up.

The smell was… Something of it tickled a memory very far away indeed, of a wood-paneled room, and warmth, and friends. Illya was there. Or… Another blond? “Steve?”

The woman’s eyebrows bounced up.

“Tell me,” Illya commanded.

The Soldier grasped hard at the wisp of memory. He brought the drink to his nose and screwed up his face with the effort. He dug the back of his wrist into his brow and shook his head. It was THERE. It was _right there_ like a sneeze that wouldn’t come and just as irritating for its delay. “I don’t remember.”

But he did. He remembered feeling safe and coddled. He remembered being warm for the first time in a long time. He remembered the earth sitting right under his feet for the first time in what felt like years. He remembered those things and wanted to wrap himself up in feeling them - wanted to curl up in the mist of a memory and let himself sink into nothing.

His wrist was wet. Tears. His tears.

“I’ve made some unfortunate mixes in my day, but this is the first time they’ve brought someone to tears,” the Whistler said, his tone sardonic.

The Soldier glanced around for cues. Illya appeared troubled, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown. The woman had an expression the Soldier couldn’t read - perhaps concern or hostility. Perhaps incredulity. The Soldier in a moment of depersonalization realized he could put names and motives and a catalog of possible reactions to the emotions on others faces, but he had only a faint idea what those emotions would feel like in himself - what his face would do or how his body would change.

“Quit looking so alarmed–” apparently the Soldier looked alarmed - he cataloged the feeling and his physical responses, “and drink your drink. It won’t help a goddamned thing but a bit of alcohol can be just the thing for you Russian types in my experience.”

The Soldier drank the drink in a slow, steady sip and placed the ice cube and cherry down in the glass, on the table beside him. The burn of hard liquor nearly didn’t register, but the bloom of sweet cherry undertones through his sinuses, the hum of spices, a tartness almost at the back of his tongue… He exhaled and more scents and flavors rolled over his palate like a choir singing the praises of an oak barrel and citrus groves. The cold of the liquid splashed into his stomach accompanied by the warmth of ethanol in a disorienting duality of sensation.

“Don’t they teach you to do anything but shotgun your liquor in that godforsaken tundra?” The Whistler was asking while the Soldier had a sensorial revelation over a drink.

“Steve and me and the guys crashed in a monastery in Anjou,” The Soldier blurted out before he could forget it. The words crystallized further memory as they left his lips. “The abbot stashed us in the cellars with some cognac and we were dry and drunk for the first time in weeks. The whole place smelled like feet and French booze from us trying to dry out our socks while we could.”

“When was this?” The woman asked.

“March of ‘44” Bucky replied.

“Iinteresting,” the Whistler drawled.

“When is it now?”

“2015,” the Soldier answered. His reasoning noted there was a dichotomy of some sort - the same tag of confusion that surrounded Illya. Time moved, but the Soldier didn’t. But the person he had been with Steve and those men in 1944 had moved. The person he had been. “I was a person.”

The woman scoffed; angry. Defensive. “Now it’s starting to make me feel bad for it. Must we do this Illyushka?”

“You did this for me,” Illya insisted.

“I did nothing of the sort,” she replied, her eyes cutting down to her own drink. She sipped and wouldn’t look at Illya or the Soldier. Discomfort. Emotional discomfort.

“Really, dearest, you were a piece of work, I’ll grant you, but you were never…” The Whistler looked at the Soldier with a composite of disgust and compassion. “Don’t get me wrong - you were a beast, but this thing hardly knows it’s human. It would be like asking an atomic bomb to learn to love.”

Illya smashed his fist on the little table beside him, and the little table simply gave up, crumpled into a heap of expensive wood. The Soldier moved as far from Illya as he could without anybody noticing. “What you do not understand, _Solo_ , is that everything he is right now, I was.” His tone was tightly controlled, belying his violent behavior.

The Whistler sighed, and Illya stalked out. “The steaks will get cold if his tantrum takes too long.”

The Whistler left, and the woman eyed him. The Soldier stared after Illya.

“Don’t mind him - putting a fist through something usually calms him down.” The Soldier pressed himself into the love seat more firmly. “Stop looking so anxious.”

The Soldier cataloged his feeling and expression as ‘anxious’, and tried to wipe them from his face. He thought of the currents of electroshock coursing through his thoughts and willed his expression to a tranquil one. Blank. Empty.

“Oh good lord,” she said. She was still displeased with him.

He looked down and let his hair cover his expression. He looked at his thumb and forefinger, grimed with gun oil. He looked at his pants and the shoelaces of his boots. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d laced his boots but they were always laced up.

“I don’t remember putting on my boots,” he said, like his brain had forgotten how to screen thoughts from his mouth. He usually had the muzzle on to remind him.

“Well I don’t remember if I’ve taken my heart medication most days - what’s your point?” She lit up a cigarette and the tickle of smoke reminded him of something else. He didn’t want to remember anything else for today. He was tired of remembering.

The woman was elegant in her bearing - she wore a pantsuit and necklace made of large glass baubles. She had a cane with a handle carved in the shape of a tiger and probably real rubies for its eyes.

“So why haven’t you tried to kill us all yet?” She took a draw on her cigarette and set it in the ashtray at her side. The Soldier followed it with his eyes and watched the ash line burn slowly down its tip.

“Should I try to kill you?” The idea felt hollow to him - without desire or imperative. Part of his mission told him he should escape - evade and escape - but… it didn’t feel like a strong part or a loud part right now. He was tired.

“Well I’m not meaning it as a suggestion. By all means, keep up the docile puppy dog act until you’ve left the premises. We have enough Russians busting up the joint to fill our quotas for matchwood.”

“I can leave the premises.” It came out as half a question and half an offer.

She waved her cane tip at him. “Don’t be dumb.”

The Soldier had the feeling he was dumb whether he wanted to be or not. She observed him in silence and he did his best not to meet her eyes.

“You knew Illya.”

No. “Yes.”

“What do you know of Illya?” It was a command to report.

“Illya Kuriyakin, inducted into the Red Room in 1958. Furnished for training to the Winter Soldier under Black Widow protocols. Assigned Red Wolf call sign for active Red Room missions. Declared a defector in 1992 with kill on sight order. Classified enhanced, extremely dangerous. Civilian casualties acceptable and expected.” The Soldier wet his lips. “Probability of mission success low if aggressor is unenhanced, if Red Wolf has a team at his disposal, or if an ambush is not an option.”

The woman pursed her lips. “When was your information Illya last updated?”

The Soldier searched his memory - so faulty in so many respects but clear as glass on others. “May 2014.”

She made a self-satisfied sound and they sat in silence for a long time. The Soldier had emotions, but he didn’t have names for them. He felt dizzy and achy with feelings, and so very tired.

He must have dozed off, because her words woke him.

“You knew Illya personally, though. Tell me what you remember.”

The Soldier thought. “I don’t remember.”

“Try harder.” Her tone brooked no disobedience.

“I remember fighting him - before today. We fought. He…” The Soldier closed his eyes to illuminate the theatre of his memory. “I wouldn’t fight him to start and we were both punished.”

“Why wouldn’t you fight him?”

_Steve, what are you doing here?_ words bubbling from him in English. “I didn’t know who he—” _Keep that filth out of your mouth_ and the taste of a cattle prod to his kidney. The Soldier jerked in the here and now. “I got confused.” The blond with too many faces had blood dripping from the corner of all of his mouths.

They were silent again. She finished her cigarette, and as she ground the butt into the ashtray she asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody,” he responded. “I’m nothing.”

\--

They sat at a dining table, a sham of a family sitting down to Sunday dinner. Illya sat across from the Soldier, the Whistler and the woman opposite one another at the foot and the head of the table. They had china and silverware while the Soldier had a plastic knife and fork and a plate which the Soldier knew would be difficult to break and unsatisfying as a weapon.

The woman cut her steak with short, jerky gestures that belied the elegance of her bearing. Her eyes cut to the Soldier often, and avoided Illya. The tension in the room was palpable - the slowly coiling scent of discontent and mistrust like cigar smoke shading the air.

“Eat,” Illya commanded when the Soldier had observed for some time.

The Soldier’s stomach rumbled, and he knew he was hungry. With some surprise he realized he wanted the food before him; that it offered pleasure of some kind he could hardly remember but craved as much as sustenance.

The plastic fork and knife had been provided for him but he had only the one arm and the one hand. A piece of beef sat on his plate, marbled with fat and topped with onions. It looked like something a person would eat. Beside it sat a baked potato, buttery spinach, and mushrooms. He stared at it all with a hunger greater than the physical.

The Soldier moved his head close to the plate, speared the meat with his flimsy plastic fork, and brought it to his mouth. At which point he felt the eyes on him - looked to his right, and saw the Whistler watching him with a rapt sort of curiosity.

“By all means, continue,” the Whistler offered.

The Soldier paused, steak nearly in his mouth.

“Now you’ve put it off its dinner,” the woman drawled, bored-sounding with an edge of cruelty.

Illya gave her an acid look and the Soldier could imagine the eye-roll the woman gave in return. Deliberately, the Soldier tore off a piece of the meat with his teeth and chewed.

Pleasure suffused his senses like a shot of opiates and he drew out the experience as long as he could. 

“Hey Mikey, I think he likes it,” the Whistler said, and he sounded sarcastic and self-satisfied, as though he had just won a bet.

The Soldier ate more quickly after that. He hacked the potato to pieces small enough to fork into his mouth and tore at the meat until it was gone. Part of the Soldier was disgusted with itself - its lack of manners and propriety. The other parts of the Soldier had little understanding of manners and no respect for propriety, and sought the pleasure of the moment with the single-minded focus of an addict. He was allowed pleasure and he would pursue it with a rapt focus until the opportunity for pleasure was removed.

He finished and watched the others finish their dinners around him. The movement of their knives and forks seemed impossibly elegant to him, like ballerinas in silver.

“Are you still hungry?” Illya asked.

The Soldier’s stomach no longer rumbled, but it was not his business to manage food intake. Handlers and technicians provided nutrients when they were required.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“Think about it and tell me when you do know.”

They put him back in the garage for the night, cuffed at the wall. Illya set up a camp cot so that he could sit or lie down without straining his shoulder too badly.

The Soldier felt heavy and warm, and his mind felt tired to its very core. 

The Soldier slept, long and deep, like time in cryo but warm where ice rime normally formed.

\--

The Soldier woke several times in the night from dreams that seemed more like memories. Tall blonds predominated, by his side and towering over him, ordering, comforting, hurting him. They were the same person to his thoughts, but his emotions told a different story.

He woke feeling more clear than he had in some time, his neck and back cramped like he had worked them to strain and beyond. His left arm was still gone, and after some consideration the Soldier determined the pain might be related to its absence. It was a different sort of pain to its presence.

He worked feeling back into his chained hand by clenching and releasing his fist, and gnawing on the muscles at the base of his thumb to relieve some of their cramping.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to chew it off to get out. That is simply too morbid.”

The Whistler set a plate down on a stacked toolbox and rested on his back foot in a thoughtful posture. Today he wore a sweater over a shirt and tie, dark slacks and softly shined loafers. He looked casual where yesterday he had been sharp, but the underlying edge of him hadn’t been blunted.

The Soldier glared at him, though with little malice. “No. Just cramped.”

“Aah, well, that’s understandable I suppose. If I release you are you going to cause any trouble?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Well, my dear with the rifle will assure us both of that then.” The woman entered the garage, the triplets of her cane echoing in the Soldier’s memory. She sat and arranged a rifle to her liking. It wouldn’t kill him unless she had exceptionally good aim, but it would certainly make escape more difficult with a hole that large through him.

“Okay.” Flashes of violent action surged through the Soldier’s memories as the Whistler approached to free him. The Soldier could be dangerous as a feral dog to most who handled him without the control words. “That’s probably a good idea,” he added, and locked eyes with the woman.

To his surprise, she flinched and her attention cut to the Whistler. “Isn’t that a novelty; they’re making them with warning labels now.” The Whistler unlocked him and put the plate within reach. This morning it was a sandwich with eggs and cheese. Sausages sat beside it, along with a long wedge of bright colored melon. 

The Soldier ate while they watched. The woman watched the closest, like he might give away some secret if she caught him at the right moment. He might; he wasn’t certain what was a secret inside of him, let alone which were secrets he wanted to keep to himself.

Long ago, the part of the Soldier that knew how to ask questions had been thoroughly burned out of him. Even so, that curiosity would sometimes resurface and no matter the punishment, he could not restrain the words from slipping out. “What are you doing with me?”

“Right now, not a damned thing, which is part of our conundrum. You see, my good wraith, it is my personal opinion that there is very little of you like a man left inside that killer shell. I have seen men tortured - I’ve even done my share of it at times - and though there is some variance in where and how a man breaks, they all do. There is a certain damage that happens to a human mind that does not leave room for repair. It’s a sad thing when it happens, but it’s not more pleasant to keep the shell of what’s left behind than to deal with the fallout in a more… comprehensive manner.”

The Soldier nodded in thought. He brought the melon to his lips and sucked the flesh off down to its hard peel. “I’m broken,” he said finally.

“Simply put, yes. Our Russian friend is of the opinion that you’ll recover in some-”

“I’m not a man,” The Soldier interrupted, and the Whistler stopped mid word, his mouth stuck ajar.

“What are you, then?” the woman asked.

_A weapon_. “I haven’t been just a man in a long time.”

“Just a man,” the Whistler repeated, slow and thoughtful. “What else, then?”

_Improved._ Or sometimes, after a particularly comprehensive wiping, _perfected_. He remembered hearing that at least once. “Can weapons have souls?” The Soldier asked, and the woman glared at him with a stormy, violent dislike.

“Now that is a question. The Shinto tradition believes in the possibility of tools gaining souls after a hundred years of faithful service. I don’t think you’ve made it nearly that long yet, though. I suppose the question my dear and I came to answer for ourselves is are we right, or has the Red Menace figured out something we haven’t yet been able to see?”

There wasn’t anything to say to that, so the Soldier kept silent. “Nothing to say for yourself?” the woman asked.

“I think I’m hungry.”

\--

The Whistler brought him the rest of the melon and watched in fascination as he ate the whole thing in a methodical fashion.

When he finished he looked from one to the other of them for a cue. Finding none, he settled into a neutral posture and relaxed his gaze into the middle distance. The Whistler fastened his wrist once more.

He waited for the emptiness to come - the absence of ponderings and thoughts and wonderings, but it didn’t happen. The Winter Soldier kept… thinking.

“I compromised base.”

“So you mentioned,” The Whisperer said.

“I compromised… bases.”

“Bases?” the woman asked.

“I got found and they took me back and I… They weren’t aware I was…”

“What did you do?” The woman asked and she sounded hungry for the answer.

“I killed them. I killed them all and I got explosives from the armory and I set them off in the server room.”

“And then?”

“I did that again. A couple more times.”

“Did you then?” The woman asked.

He could identify her sarcasm but he couldn’t pinpoint why. “Yes.”

“I think what she means to ask, is ‘why?’”

He frowned but didn’t respond for a long time. “I don't know,” he finally responded. The Whistler and the woman exchanged a look and cold burning prickles rushed down the Soldiers spine. He did know, and they knew he knew. 

Illya entered and the Whistler rose. The Soldier tugged once, weakly, against the cuff. The movement wasn’t sharp enough to hurt, but reinforced his captivity. Illya looked at the Soldier, his brow wrinkled, and was drawn into the other room by the Whistler.

The woman stayed steady behind her rifle, her eyes hooded and considering. Her expression didn’t change, but that was not comforting. Punishment could be dealt just as effectively without passion - sometimes more so.

Illya strode back in, his steps staccato, the click of his heels sharp as a stiletto. The Whistler didn’t return. Illya pulled a trunk nearer to the Soldier’s cot, pulled the creases from his slacks, and sat with his legs braced wide. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned down so his face was on the level with the Soldier’s - so he could clearly see into the core of him.

“Why did you compromise bases after your escape?” Illya asked, and Bucky was drawn into his eyes, right out of the center of the maelstrom of the Soldier’s fear and confusion.

“I was _scared_.”

If this was the punishment it was as bad as any he could remember. The Soldier felt himself torn apart, crushed like a body through a wood chipper with the admission. The cold wall that kept back those feelings and those reactions - those emotions that aggregated into humanity - had a crack in it running top to bottom, and red as blood they were seeping through the ice.

“What were you scared of?” Illya asked, again calm but implacable.

The Soldier was silent, only startled from his internal turmoil when drops landed on his thighs. Tears. Bucky cried silently, a weeping leak down his cheeks, across his jaw line, and down his chin. At last he leaned to the side and wiped his face on the fabric at his shoulder. His mouth ticked up at the corner. “Everything.” He laughed wetly. “Eeeeeeeverything, all the time.”

“I think you broke him,” the woman said, and Illya shushed her.

Bucky’s gaze turned to her, eyes wide and red rimmed and glassy with tears. “Not him, them,” he said, a crazed tone to his voice. “They broke me down to nothin’ and I knew if they got me back… I’d be the one breaking people down to sand and gravel. Again.”

Bucky and the Soldier oozed into one another - each a poison into the other’s wounds - and they hurt like being skinned alive and burned up from the inside out. They leaned heavily on their arm, pulling on the cuff and their wrist with the dead weight of their body and the pressing overwhelming pressure of their despair.

“ _Soldat_ ,” Illya commanded, and the Soldier jerked upright. “You did well.” The words of approval washed away the pain in the Soldier and he sagged with relief. “You will rest now,” Illya instructed, and the Soldier lay down once more and slept.

\--

The Soldier woke with his eyes crusted shut in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar manner. He reached for his face but was brought up short first by the cuff and then by his lack of a left arm. He let out a breath in a frustrated sigh and sat upright, bringing his face to his hand. The crust was gooey yellow eye discharge, and it stuck to his lashes and caused him to wrinkle his nose in disgust. 

He rubbed the goo between his fingers until it crumbled away and sat still and quiet. The glint of shop lighting off of the metal ball of his left shoulder drew his eye. He couldn’t bring it quite into focus due to the angle, but as he looked down and saw his arm missing he felt an uncontrollable well of loss open in him and he couldn’t stop staring, craning to see where the metal housing rested against his pectoral. His breathing quickened to the point that his head swam, and that of all things seemed to calm his body.

Illya found him a while later sitting on his cot looking limp and worn. The Soldier looked up at Illya with a hangdog expression and a wealth of confusion on his face. “Why am I like this?”

Illya rumbled consideringly deep in his chest. “We cannot be certain.” Something other than the Soldier - more than the Soldier - looked up at Illya, lost and in pain. Illya spoke slowly. “I can only tell you why I am as I am.”

Illya sat on the trunk opposite him and spoke with the cadence of a storyteller.

“My father was middling high in the Party in the USSR when I was a child. He betrayed someone, or someone betrayed him, or he was the sacrificial goat for someone’s mistake even higher up, and he went to the gulag in disgrace. They came to our home and offered me a choice: serve my homeland with honor and clear the stain of my father’s reputation, or my mother and I would go to stay with my father for as long as we lived.” Illya wet his lips. Bucky and the Soldier hung on his words with a frightening attention.

“I went to live with other boys and girls - other loyal servants to our homeland. They trained us, and on the best of us, they experimented. Many died: most died. They had more boys than girls when the program started but by graduation I was the only man left amongst the Black Widows.”

“ _The Red Room_ ,” the Soldier murmured, the smell of crisp ice and wet concrete mingled with women’s voices.

“That is where I met you. They said you were the first and that was why you were as you were; that something of the process had broken you a bit. I didn’t know until much later that they hoped to break us all just the same.”

Bucky stared, squinted into the far distance trying to see or remember something. “The chair.” Bucky and the Soldier both flinched away from memories from before the chair locked it all away, in the face of remembered flashes of disorienting pain.

“They never used it on me. They said I didn’t need it; I was perfected from your rough experiment.” Illya shrugged. “Their idea of perfection was not… the other boys and men they experimented on, some died, but some turned into monsters. Beasts that were powerful but uncontrollable. They put them down as animals, but they said I had leashed my monster. They said that the rage inside of me would serve my strength and my country.”

Bucky looked into Illya’s face like he might see some of himself in the other man. He felt they should be like brothers or cousins or… something. Bonded by blood and by history they were _something_ to each other. Something lurked in Illya that the soldier remembered but did not himself have. There was anger in Bucky certainly - rage - but it wasn't something the Soldier tapped into when he worked.

“I didn't know for certain that it was something their experiments did to me and not some way I was… the way I was born, until the abomination in New York that tore apart Harlem. It was some kind of super serum and it was a sort of monster I knew.”

“I'm not like that,” Bucky said.

“No. You never were.”

They stared at one another for a long while. When Illya spoke again the storytellers cadence returned. “You trained me to be more than they could imagine. The Red Room knew human limits and they knew some of what they had made us, but when we fought I learned that seemingly nothing was impossible. I think you nearly killed me a few times - I'm not so durable as you.”

“Sorry,” Bucky offered with more bewilderment than remorse.

Illya shrugged and waved his apology off.

“How did you escape?”

“I never did.” Cold fear raced down their spine until Illya noticed and laughed at his terror. “No no, this is not some wild set up. Merely I transferred for a job and by the time the job was done the Red Room as I knew it was gone and I had made myself useful elsewhere. They didn't let me go but eventually I bored them. Returning me to service became more trouble than it was worth.”

Bucky nodded, thoughtful in ways the Soldier was not.

“They still try, from time to time, but those who remembered me are old and dead, and those who know of me still are rightfully wary. I stayed with my partners, when Russia no longer held my leash.”

Bucky frowned, his eyes narrowed in confusion. “Partners? The woman and…”

“The American, yes. We were all of an age, once; the three musketeers but spies. You know of U.N.C.L.E.?” Bucky nodded warily. “We worked together in U.N.C.L.E.’s shelter until the end of the Cold War. By that time it was clear that… that I would not grow old and grey with them.”

“You’re… disappointed?”

Illya snorted a sad breath. “Everyone deserves retirement and a quiet old age, don’t you think? To grow old beside those they love; to rest for a while?”

“Love is for children,” the Soldier replied, automatic and without thought. Bucky frowned. “Those you love?” His eyes went to the fire door and back to Illya’s face.

Illya smiled like the sunrise. “Yes.” He shrugged, chagrin written clearly on his face. “They won’t let me deny it, even to strangers and captives.” Bucky said nothing, but his questions were clear on his face. “They taught me all the things the Red Room left out. They helped me when I didn’t know enough to ask for it.”

“The man on the bridge - on the carriers; he knew my name.”

“Then he knows more than me,” Illya pointed out.

“He knew my name and he knew _me_.” 

“Who was this man on the bridge? Could you find him again?”

“It was the target.”

They stared at each other. “The target,” Illya repeated. “Captain America?” His voice rose in volume and pitch.

Abruptly, an intercom screeched above both their heads. “Illya,” the Whistler said in poorly rendered echoes, “you’re needed in the front room.”

Illya frowned at the speaker, looked to the Soldier, and bit the inside of his cheek. “I will return.”

“I understand,” the Soldier replied and remained quiescent. Bucky pushed his memories around like banks of snow in his mind. Their slush mired him down and froze him until his bones hurt with the cold of them.

His fist pounded into Captain America’s face hard enough that his stupid “A” helmet flew off. A stranger’s face he knew and hated and loved looked up at him, swelling and bloody and the Soldier felt a wildfire of anger and Bucky felt rising bile. His fist pounded into Steve’s face and the Soldier’s anger and Bucky’s terror/horror bled together until the other man fell.

Symmetry, though he wouldn’t recall why.

He startled from the memory when Illya called him back. “ _Soldat._ ” The word cracked like a slap across the face, and he straightened on a huge inhale of air, feeling like he was suffocating. His eyes focused on Illya’s face after a moment, the features of the Russian and Captain America blending together like layers of oil paint. Bucky screwed his eyes shut until his head hurt, and opened them to Illya and the Whistler.

“He has no idea who he is,” the Whistler told Illya in an undertone filled with a sort of wonder.

“Steve called me Bucky,” Bucky said, and it hurt deep in his brain to say it.

“Indeed,” the Whistler said, his voice resonant. “And what a strange name that is to call you. I thought it odd at the time, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.”

“Get to the point,” Illya muttered.

The Whistler paused his cadence to favor Illya with a slow smile laced with fondness. “Now, now, give me my dramatics. You’re not the one with a ticking clock.” Illya scoffed. “Now, I thought it odd, but I couldn’t figure why. I was thinking about Captain America, though, and I remembered.” He had been pacing to and fro as he spoke, and with his last word he spun on his heel to pin Bucky with a gleeful look that shot instinctual terror down his spine. He hardly heard the Whistler’s next words. “Captain America ran with the Howling Commandos - notable among them his best friend, Bucky Barnes. _That can’t possibly be,_ I thought to myself, except I looked up some old newsreels and wouldn’t you know?”

“Stop,” the Soldier commanded. 

“You aren’t a Russian.

“Stop,” Bucky begged.

“You never were.”

The words hurt, drowned in a thunder of a blood-red flag and his own heartbeat. A voice spoke numbers in a broken, desperate tone. Three. Two. Five five. Seven oh three eight. Three two five five-

“And by his own words,” the Whistler cried, and pulled a printout from his breast pocket. “Look, he knows his serial number.”

“Stop,” Illya commanded, and by miracle, the Whistler was silenced.

Bucky shook in every part, from fingertips to his core, and the numbers rolled out of him like newsprint of the press. He clenched his fist and pulled it tight against the restraint until the pain screamed through is arm and he screamed himself, breaking through the numbers with a hoarse shout.

It felt good to scream so he did it again - longer and anguished. The pain funneled through his voice and he just kept going, bellowing wordlessly until he subsided into sobs.

“Good lord, what a show,” the Whistler said, and Bucky _heard_ and for the first time in a long time, _understood_ the degrading sarcasm and he growled and tried to reach the Whistler, to grind his flesh between his teeth and tear him to meat and gristle as he never had his Hydra handlers. The Whistler went another step out of his range in the restraints, almost dainty in his movements, and raised his eyebrows at Illya. “Yes, he’s doing quite the job of convincing me he’s no mad dog. The foaming spittle is quite the touch.”

Illya cuffed the other man on the shoulder - not hard, but a reproof. He did not look amused, nor particularly kindly towards his partner. “You have had your drama. Go.”

The Whistler left through the fire door and Bucky sobbed, moaning into his shoulder and biting the flesh of his arm to muffle himself. Illya disappeared, and returned to loom over him for a long moment. Bucky looked up. “I will release your restraint. You must remain here.” Bucky nodded, pathetic and desperate.

Illya released him, and as he sagged forward, Illya pushed a stuffed a pillow against his chest. Bucky’s arm went about it automatically and hugged it against his trunk. Next a blanket settled over his shoulders, heavy and napped like fur. Illya tucked it securely across his body and under his chin like a child and Bucky just curled up tighter until he rolled over on his side in a lump of misery.

\--

Bucky woke feeling exhausted and resentful and like someone had tried to pull his body apart from several angles at once. He woke with a blanket still wrapped around his shoulders and a pillow still clutched to his stomach. He woke to soft light and the quiet breathing of another human sleeping.

“Illya?”

Illya did not startle awake but he did take a deep, sharp breath. “Yes?”

“What’s that asshole’s name?”

Illya’s eyebrows rose, and something like amusement or glee lurked behind his eyes. “Napoleon Solo.”

Solo the Whistler. “If he gives me half a chance I’m gonna knock his block off.”

“We shall have to work to not give you the chance, then. A punch in your weight class could very well kill him at his age.”

Bucky pursed his lips, resentful and bitter. “What’s one more on the ledger?” he asked rhetorically.

Illya and Bucky looked at each other for several long minutes, Illya curiously and Bucky with an exhausted resignation.

“Gaby has decided you can be repaired,” Illya said.

“The woman?” Illya nodded. “Why does she want to fix me, now?”

“Repaired, not fixed,” the woman’s accented English rang through the garage. Behind one of the vehicles a work light shone. “Returned to functionality,” she added. “As a human being, not a murderous automaton.”

Bucky looked to Illya and got only a prosaic shrug. “Why?”

The sound of stool legs scraping across the floor echoed, and her footsteps followed. She wore a jumpsuit like a mechanic’s, and jeweler’s glasses sat atop her head amongst the waves of white-grey hair. “Because Illyushka was right.” She moved to where Illya sat - she was only just a bit taller than him like that while she stood - and dropped a kiss on the back of his head. “I had thought all the parts that made you a man had been taken out.” Her eyes swept over Bucky and his pillow on the cot, and skittered away. “I don’t think that now.”

The Soldier’s emptiness weighted down Bucky’s emotions at those words - muted them to a far off tidal rush. “Maybe it woulda been better if you had put me down.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t be tiresome,” she said, and walked away once more.

\--

They gave him Solo’s print-outs on himself. He read slowly, with a lot of re-reading to be certain he absorbed it all. Some of it felt familiar - a tickle, like a sneeze that wouldn’t come - and some of it was just words on a page. When his mind drifted he often found himself recalling his own abrupt violence in a way that hurt like punches to the ribs.

They also gave him newspaper prints and intelligence reports on Pierce. Pierce was dead. _Handler compromised. Command unspecified_ the Soldier whispered inside him, and a vice that had gripped the nape of his neck loosened.

“You’re sure?” The Senator’s face haunted him, blended with Steve’s in a confusing mish-mash.

“As sure as anybody can be. There was a funeral.” Illya shrugged.

Bucky stared at a photo of a young man in army greens. “You think I was him?”

Solo had returned to the garage, remaining well away from Bucky but within earshot. “I think you _are_ him. Quite aside the uncanny resemblance, the timelines match up well enough to be suspect. And if Captain America himself identified you, I don’t see any reason to doubt.”

Bucky looked at the picture and tried to remember it being taken. He tried to imagine wearing the rough American wool coat, his hair carefully styled, his eyes so young. There was a fuzzy wall of pain and disorientation that felt like a curtain of static electricity discharging occasional lightning bolts, that cloaked some parts of him. He remembered the Red Room. Missions. Training. He remembered discomfort and privation and agony. Dimly he remembered a time when he still pleaded for it to end and cried for relief, but before that was haze and confusion and despair.

“I don’t remember.” 

“Bucky Barnes and you certainly look similar enough that I’d believe it. It could be some conspiracy of-”

“Do I?”

They stared at him for a moment. “Yes,” Illya finally said, as though the answer should be plain.

“Do you- Do you not know what you look like?” Solo asked in astonishment.

Bucky had seen his reflection in water once or twice, and had a vague sense of his features - Caucasian, dark hair, strong build - but he had not looked in a mirror at _himself_ since his escape, and if he had looked into one before that he could not recall.

Illya raised his voice. “Darling, do you have a compact on you?”

“I have one on the vanity,” Gaby replied.

Illya and Solo argued wordlessly over who would go for the item.

“I’m not gonna hurt anybody,” Bucky said, low and sad.

Solo raised his brows and looked pointedly at Illya who left.

“You remember nothing from before your time as a Soviet assassin but you remember Captain America. How does that work?”

“I don’t _know_.”

“I suppose it’s possible you received some information about him in the intervening–” Solo mused, ignoring Bucky’s frustration.

“Please stop,” Bucky begged.

Illya returned and Solo closed his mouth abruptly.

“Here,” Illya handed Bucky a little makeup compact with a mirror in it and stepped back.

Bucky looked into it and was transfixed. A face stared back at him - his face, and the face of the man in the documents. The scruff of his beard was patchy and grubby looking as was the rest of him. His hair was greasy and long and his eyes had lines and wrinkles couching them that the Barnes of the past hadn’t yet developed.

“Why do you keep needling him?” Illya hissed to Solo.

“Just turning up the pressure a bit to see what oozes out,” Solo replied in a conversational tone.

“He has had enough pressure, I think. Be nice or be gone.”

Bucky looked up in time to see Solo give Illya a hard, considering glare before he turned and left.

“He doesn’t like me.”

“No,” Gaby replied in the face of Illya’s silence. “If I know him at all, I’d say he’s jealous. Jealous and scared.”

“Of me?”

“Of what you represent. Don’t let it bother you, dear.”

Bucky nodded with a deep frown. He turned back to the mirror and the photograph and stared into eyes which he was beginning to believe were his own.

\--

Bucky ate with an uncommon hunger, and spent an inordinate amount of time staring at himself in the little makeup mirror. Illya offered to watch over him and leave him unrestrained in sleep, but Bucky shook his head. “I don’t know what I’ll wake up like- Who I’ll wake up… like.”

Illya looked troubled but nodded.

“I’m… We’re safe here, right? From Hydra?” He hadn’t asked it before then; though fear was a fixture within him, he had not had the clarity to direct it at any particular possible instance. Now as he found himself thinking like a human being for the first time in (apparently) seventy years or so, he clung tightly to the privilege.

“We are secure here. Hydra would be challenged to find us, let alone breach the defenses,” Illya assured him. “We do not take security lightly in this family.”

The next time Bucky woke they let him into their living room and he was given the run of the place. They showed him the bathtub and shower and he spent nearly two hours in the bathroom, shouting reassurances through the door when one or the other of them came to check he was okay. He read each hair and body product before using one of each type as indicated on the labels. The grime and grit sloughed off his body (though parts were unreachable with only one arm), and his scalp ached with cleanliness. He found some stuff labeled “beard oil” and dutifully rubbed a bit into his chin scruff. It smelled like tree resin and herbs, and its presence right under his nose was comfortingly persistent.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and scrubbed clean and skin flushed from the warmth he could almost imagine himself as a man. Forget the cybernetics, beyond the holey memory and how responding to orders still made him _feel good_ like a drink to an alcoholic; he was a person. He could be a person again, with some practice and some help.

\--

They dressed them in their clothes and sat him in their big comfy chair and he couldn't remember a time aside from after he got the measles that he was so bone tired from a bath.

“I had the measles.”

The look Gaby gave him was scandalized. “Not recently I hope.”

“No, I was… I was a teenager I think. I think I remember being a teenager.”

“What else do you remember about it?”

“Nothing really.” Bucky frowned and then smirked. “Except how I couldn't see my best friend for like a month. I was so mad.”

“Hmm,” Gaby replied. “I suppose it's a start.” She entered the kitchen and came out with a small plastic facsimile of a nuclear device. She removed the top and he saw it was an ice bucket. “I'm having a drink - would you like one?” Bucky gave the bar cart a mistrustful glance. “I promise no trips down memory lane. Midori wasn't even invented before you- well.”

“Alright. Yes,” he paused for a long moment and looked uncomfortable like he needed to burp but had forgotten how, “please.”

The drink she gave him was a lurid green and had a sour artificial smell. He waited to see her drink some before taking a hesitant sip. The artificial overtones made his nose wrinkle up, but the flavor was pleasant; sweet without being cloying, with a floral fruitiness and an acidic bite. He breathed in and out and licked his lips, letting the flavor run its course along his senses, and went back for more.

“What do you think?” Gaby asked.

“It’s… different.” He took another sip, chasing the potent sweetness with a compulsive hunger. The burn of alcohol down his throat hardly registered against the tangy, fruity, sugar-drop.

Her eyebrows went up. “Really.”

Bucky shook himself like a dog, the sensation of pleasure running all through him with the cold slosh of alcohol in his stomach. He smiled. “It’s good. It’s… sweet.”

Her lips turned up in a smile to match his. “Good answer. The boys won’t join me in appreciating the finer things.”

“Scotch,” Solo said from the other room, “is a finer thing. Wine, is a finer thing. There is a time and place for Midori and that is at a disco after doing cocaine off a woman’s stomach. It is most definitely _not_ a finer thing.” Bucky tensed minutely at the sound of Solo’s voice.

Gaby scoffed theatrically.

“I do not agree with the cocaine, but I agree with the sentiment,” Illya added from behind a book.

“They have no sense of fun,” Gaby deadpanned at Bucky, and he smiled again. She was including him in a joke. She was making a joke with him. He was part of a joke, and he marveled at it - the feeling of being part of something light and childish and unnecessary. Gaby wagged her finger at him. “You, look like under the body armor and smelly hair, you could be fun.”

Solo slipped into the living room. “I don’t think you’ll like what he finds fun, Gabs.” Bucky shrunk a little into himself, pulled from the light moment like a splinter from flesh. The Soldier straightened his back for them and leveled a blank look at Solo. “Just because a wolf eats from your hand doesn’t mean he won’t bite it off.”

Illya lowered his book and pinned Solo with a sharp look. “When is dinner?” he asked evenly.

Solo’s expression didn’t falter, but the Soldier felt the other man’s mood sour. “Twenty minutes.” He left the room and the clattering and hiss of pans was clearly heard, joined by the smells of cooking pork fat.

Illya returned to his book. Gaby assessed the Soldier in a slow look up and down. “You don’t like our Napoleon much.”

“He doesn’t much like me,” Bucky replied, the iron of the Soldier’s wariness keeping them rigid and ready.

“I didn’t much like you quite recently and you seem to have recovered.” She quirked an eyebrow at him; a challenge.

They remained silent and on guard.

Gaby tutted, stood, moved across the room. Illya lowered his book slowly, his expression dubious. She sat on the arm of their big, comfy chair. She lowered her voice and her eyelashes, flirty even at her age. “Do you know why he doesn’t like you?”

Bucky thought. “No.”

“He’s jealous of you.” Illya gave Gaby a disbelieving look. The Soldier stared at her in incomprehension. “You caught up all of little Illyushenka’s attention and now _mine_. He’s just being petty because he thinks,” she raised her voice to near a shout to be certain Solo could hear, “ **we like you better**.”

They heard a bang from the kitchen and Solo returned, face stormy. His gaze grew poisonous when he saw Gaby sitting on the arm of Bucky’s chair “Now wait just a second—”

Gaby stood, her cane stabbing down between Bucky’s feet. “We are not going to fuck the Winter Soldier,” she shouted. “And if you don’t stop acting like a sulky child I will not be fucking you either.”

\--

Dinner was awkward.

Solo simmered. Gaby sparked with annoyance. Illya acted as though everything was perfectly normal.

The Soldier still had plastic flatware but this time dinner didn’t require a knife. They ate, and exchanged uncomfortable looks, and stayed silently buried in their food.

“This is very good,” Illya said in the tone of someone who knew full well they were jumping into the path of live fire.

“The tomatoes have to be in season,” Solo replied with the grace of someone surprised into following a dance step, “otherwise it’s simply not worth eating.” He took a pointed sip of wine.

“As always, you impress,” Illya returned.

Gaby rolled her eyes and threw down her napkin. “I’d think he’s a crumpet the way you’re buttering him,” she said and stood to clear the table.

Once again, Bucky got the “I have to burp but I’ve forgotten how,” expression and managed to push out, “thank you for dinner,” while staring straight ahead.

Solo paused with his hand on the table having just stood; his eye line moved to Bucky, to Gaby, and into the distance. Without a word he turned and left.

“Come help me wash up,” Gaby said after a moment.

Bucky followed Gaby and Illya followed them both. In the small kitchen the three of them were crowded in like canned meat, but neither of them seemed fazed. Illya put a kettle on and lounged at the wall while Gaby began collecting the pans from dinner and soaking the dinner plates.

There were a lot of knives in the kitchen. Illya locked eyes with him as though he had spoken aloud and gave him a stern look. He tore his eyes from the magnetic knife rack and stood to Gaby’s side. She handed him plates to dry, and he put them down and dabbed at them with a kitchen towel; it was not the most efficient procedure but she didn’t seem to care.

“Napoleon puts you on edge,” Gaby said. Bucky looked from the slightly stooped line of her shoulders, to Illya and back again. “Why?” Gaby prompted.

Bucky chewed the inside of his cheek and dabbed with more concentration at a saucepan. He shook his head and dropped the towel in the pan. “He, uh- he reminds me. Of the guys who-” he stuttered to a halt and coughed out a frustrated breath. “Of the guys who pulled the strings in Hydra.”

Gaby’s eyes went large with surprise. With sympathy. “Oh, I had no idea.”

“They always wore snappy suits, and talked real slick… When I first got here he just- I just got the same feeling…”

“That sounds upsetting.”

He huffed a laugh. “Yeah.”

Gaby patted his shoulder and continued the washing up. “I could say any number of unflattering things about our Napoleon, but I can also say he’s never been Hydra.”

Gaby and Illya exchanged an amused expression. “Oh I could say many things about Solo which he would not appreciate,” Illya agreed.

Illya brought him back to the shackle. “If I left this off you, what would you do?” The Soldier shrugged, confused by the question. “Would you run away? Try to kill us as we slept? Reorganize the ratchet sets against Gaby’s wishes?”

“I don’t know,” the Soldier replied. Bucky frowned. “I dunno. I don’t really…” Illya waited. “I don’t wanna find out right now.”

“As you wish.”

Illya restrained him in the wrist cuff, but didn’t move away. Bucky looked up at his broad chest and the underside of his chin and felt simultaneously small and young, and withered and old. Illya sat on the cot beside him, his chained wrist between them.

“When I was much younger, one of the Black Widow girls escaped. It was before they had improved their serum and boys and girls were disappearing so we didn’t even know… They caught her, and they brought her back, and they used her as bait for the dogs. They made sure all of us watched. After that, every night before sleep the trainers would chain us to the bedrails to be certain that if our fear wasn’t enough to keep us captive, their iron would be.”

Bucky felt something writhe within him; snaking tentacles of horror and disgust within a coal fire of rage. 

“They restrained me, but not… Not with anything I couldn’t break out of, after they- after I-” Bucky trembled, though so gently Illya barely felt where their shoulders touched. “I think they knew they’d burned whatever it is that struggles and runs right out of me.”

\--

Days for Bucky and the Soldier fell into a sort of pattern. They woke, were released and fed. Ablutions usually followed. The trio came and went in their daily activities and he had no set schedule, but he usually spent some time with Gaby in the garage. She was in the process of restoring an army jeep, and he found some part of him remembered repairing similar. It was soothing some times, and maddening others.

They had nightmares some nights, but the overwhelming volume of horror almost served as Novocaine; it was too much to focus on one tragedy they’d enacted, and so it just stretched like an endless battlefield seen from a thousand feet up.

Bucky and the Soldier sloshed around in each other, blending together as reluctantly as vinegar and oil in a vinaigrette. Bucky often felt himself to be a person without any of what normally went into that - memories and history and experiences. The Soldier had all of that but without the underpinnings of personhood. When Bucky faltered, the automatic reactions of the Soldier picked up and his experience informed their actions.

“I feel like I’m stuck in a house with a serial killer,” he confessed to Gaby.

“Three of them, actually,” she replied from under the steering column of the jeep. “Only when you do it for a government they call you an ‘eliminations expert’. Always thought that made it sound like you pooped with extra grace.”

He laughed. “No, I meant–”

“Oh don’t be dense: I knew what you meant.” She continued doing what she was doing for a while. “How many did you kill in the War?”

“Howlies didn’t keep count.” He didn’t remember that from personal experience but he had been reading up on his life before his death and rebirth as a Russian son.

“Yes, but it was war and you were a sniper. UNCLE wasn’t even _in_ a war officially and our body count would have rivaled most famous killers.” She threw her tools on the seat next to her. “Help me out of here.” He helped her out from under the steering column and offered her her cane. “So you killed some people. People die all the time from all sorts of things, and dying for Russian politics is no more or less dignified than most other ways to go.”

“These weren’t combatants that they sent the Soldier after.”

“War never only kills soldiers.” Something dark passed behind her eyes and she smiled bitterly. “That’s only a lie the winning sides tell themselves. How many do you think? Before you died?” she pressed.

“I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty?”

“Is that all?” She asked, her tone teasing but her intent cutting.

“What’s your point?”

“You were a killer before you were the Winter Soldier; the Red Room just took away the moral imperative that you used to justify it to yourself. Be horrified by what they made you do, not what you became.” His brows wrinkled up in confusion and anger and hurt. “You _are_ the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier always was Bucky Barnes.”

“Doesn’t it matter, though? What he- What I did?”

“Of course it does - it all does.” He was lost and she looked a nostalgic kind of sad. “But all those people who you killed - it was never about _you_. It was about politics and power and nations and Hydra. That was never on you because you never had a choice. You never had a chance.”

\--

After that, anger boiled in Bucky; undirected, indiscriminate, and unpredictable. He wanted to run until his lungs gave out or until he escaped his own reality. He wanted to hurt something. Someone. Himself if there was no other target. He wanted to pound something living until it was not any longer. And he scared himself with the force of emotion and what an outlet might bring him. The conflagration within him had found vent as the Winter Soldier - as he - had gone from Hydra outpost to Hydra base and did exactly what he craved. It had felt cruelly good. It had felt immorally good. It had felt _right_ in those perfect, horrible moments, like the ringing of church bells through his soul - no history and no future - just the present, overwhelming, over-saturated, over-everything feeling that slaked a thirst he had only then remembered.

He craved the destruction of the world which had constructed him, and he feared that craving like most feared death.

They all must have known something was going on within him, but Illya was the one to come to help.

“You seem tense.” The absurdity of the understatement startled Bucky into a laugh. “It’s no wonder - lounging around the house all the time, never putting in a hard day’s work - it’s bad for the body and the mind.” 

“What, you’re a doctor now?”

Illya shrugged. “I have learned many things over my long life. Come.”

They dressed in Illya’s work clothes and Illya showed him outside. In the time since Hydra emerged it had become summer and moved on to fall. The trees had the warm, overblown colors of autumn, but the cold had yet to set in. Bucky had seen the outside - even gone on a few walks with Illya and sometimes Gaby. They had an area shaded by trees too sparse to be called a garden or yard. They had a few plots of flowering shrubs in the front behind a low wall.

They walked around the side to a scene of construction - some of a pit had been dug, a wheelbarrow sat beside it, and piled on a pallet were bags of cement. Further down the wall some boxes or something boxy was covered with tarps against the rain.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “What’s this?” he asked, though he was beginning to suspect he knew.

“Work,” Illya replied simply.

“Don’t know if you noticed, but I may not be so useful.” He looked meaningfully at his left side and the still empty socket where the Winter Soldier’s arm attached.

“Nonsense. ‘Each according to his ability’,” Illya said, a boyish smirk teasing his mouth.

“Each according to his needs,” Bucky replied, resigned but feeling inexplicably good humored about it.

They worked.

According to a biography he’d read of the Howling Commandos, he’d worked as a day laborer before the War. He imagined this wasn’t so different - carrying, digging, stamping down dirt. Illya set him to mixing cement in buckets with his bare hand, up to past his elbow in grit. When it was mixed to a chunky slurry but before it reached smooth uniformity, he punched into the sandy liquid, imagining it was any of a number of half-remembered handlers’ faces.

It felt right. After just a couple of weeks of idleness he was out of condition, and even with his enhancements he found himself tiring after a few hours of hard work. He sat on his heels and took a breath. “What’s all this even for?”

Illya nodded towards a rain spout which emptied the gutters on this side of the building. “A rain barrel. We were having some problems with seepage in the sub-basement, and I think this will help.” Bucky looked over some of the supplies he had helped unpack, but couldn’t see that any of them would make a barrel, even with time and creativity. “It is all tubes of special plastic, not barrels like for liquor. They get housed in the box we will build on the cement we just poured, when it is set.”

“Oh.”

“Now we must wait; we can continue building next week.”

That project was delayed to next week, but the next day they cleared out brush in a small wooded area on the property, and Illya used a chainsaw to break down logs which Bucky dragged to the wood pile. When the work wasn’t enough to wear them out, they traded turns on the heavy bag and went on long hikes through the neighborhood.

It helped.

He was still angry - he nearly choked with the molten rage in some moments - but the work and the effort, the progress and accomplishment... It helped.

It was like his body had been waiting for that kind of blood flow to start fixing the fucked up connections in his mind. His heart had gotten pumping plenty when he was still mostly the Winter Soldier, but that had been the spikes of focused adrenaline and the out of body euphoric high of combat. Bucky realized that part of what had kept him - the Bucky part of him - buried so deep was the fear the Soldier never seemed to feel. 

That fear had kept him shackled within himself, trapped beneath a layer of icy terror as effectively as a drowning man beneath a frozen-over lake. His time shackled in the garage served him like a vacation and thawed the fear enough to let him up for air.

With activity and purpose (beyond from the whole “destroy my enemies, bathe in their blood, light the fires that will burn for a thousand years and scour the earth upon which they built” shtick) the painful fuzz in his brain thinned and sometimes, memories would just come.

He’d graduated high school. His ma was so proud she put it in the church paper.

After Azzano, Steve had slept with him like when they’d been kids ‘cause both of them were so afraid it was a dream they couldn’t get to sleep otherwise.

The swoop in his stomach when he ziplined onto that train in the Alps was terrifying but it was also kind of fun.

Solo warmed up to him when it became evident Illya and Gaby were mostly interested in him as a source of redemption and a new toy, respectively. He lectured Bucky about art in strident, confident tones. He reminisced about con jobs and heists and all manner of shenanigans from his time with UNCLE. He fed them all and cared for them all and clucked over them like a mother hen.

“You know, I’m never in favor of pushing a chick out of the nest before it’s ready, but it seems to me that you’ve got things to be doing outside our humble abode.” Solo said it casually, but thoughtfully, like he’d been considering saying something for a while and had finally decided how to put it finally.

“Like what?” Bucky asked, and put the stack of plates away.

“Destroying Hydra. Recovering old friends. Saving the world if something like the aliens happens again. Take your pick.” Bucky frowned. “Not that you’re not welcome here. The Russian was right when he caught you and right when he kept you. I never went through half of what you did, and god knows I could have used a few weeks off some years of my life. But all I’m saying is, there’s no need to stick around the retirement home when you’ve got business elsewhere.”

“I’m not- That’s not-” Solo cocked his head to the side with a sad, knowing smile.

“I’ve lived this life a lot longer than you have, kid. Some day not so far away, Gabs and I are going to kick the bucket, and Illya will keep on, young and hale. He’ll grieve, but it will be a second life for him to try things again, meet someone new, do something different.” Solo shrugged, and Bucky had to give him credit - he actually looked happy for Illya. “He’ll reinvent himself like he has before.” He pushed out a breath more like a sigh. “For now though, we are tying him down, so he will stay. You on the other hand, don’t have decades of star-crossed love tethering you to our garage.” Solo’s intellect pierced through Bucky. “You don’t have to decide now; just think about it.”

\--

“I think I’m ready to go,” he told Gaby a few days later.

“You’ll need the arm back then,” she replied matter of factly.

“It’s not broken?”

“It’s not broken _any longer_. I fixed it a while ago, after I disabled all the Hydra nonsense they loaded into it.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.”

“You’ll need a car, too. The Volvo, I think; reliable, nondescript, and I put a good bit of body armor into it without having to mess around with the suspension.”

“I couldn’t ask-” Bucky began.

“You didn’t.” She cut him off with the ease of experience. She didn’t ask him if he was sure, for which he was grateful. He wasn’t sure about anything these days, and sure or not, he had made a decision.

They didn’t rush him - they just kept giving him things until he felt like the world’s deadliest charity case.

“Where are you off to?” Solo asked as he pressed a shaving kit on the other man.

“DC, I think. I’d like to learn more about who I was - who I am - before I deal with any of the rest.”

“You know the Smithsonian has a very interesting exhibit on you and your friends from the War.”

Bucky smiled like he hadn’t already been planning to go. “I’ll add it to the list.”

\--

Getting into the Smithsonian without having to go through a metal detector and give away that hey, he had a massive robot arm and also was a wanted criminal/assassin/terrorist was much more annoying than he had anticipated.

_Friends since childhood..._

Watching the videos and listening to the footage was definitely worth it though.

He looked at the image of Steve, transforming from scrawny shrimp to Grade A Beefcake and nodded to himself. “I’m coming for you, punk,” he murmured under his breath, and took his leave.


End file.
